A recent article in Sports Illustrated featured three colleges as being state of the art in football. One of the schools had an extremely large weight room and the most impressive features (according to the article) was the wide array of exercise machines that they used and the $650,000 worth of weights.
Another college was touted as being on top of the food chain. The athletes were “fed like champs” with gourmet-type meals. The third school had a modern sports medicine center that had nine athletic trainers and many state-of-the-art physical therapy pieces of equipment.
It is great to see innovations such as this that will no doubt be of great assistance to many athletes. However, there was nothing in the article that alluded to how the players were significantly better in their performance because of these impressive features. Instead of improving performance, their biggest role appeared to be in recruiting athletes. They were very impressed when they saw these facilities and in many cases, it helped sway them to sign with that particular school. However, even though these facilities and features are very impressive, it does not mean that they are also effective in producing high-level athletes or in improving athletic performance.
It is important to understand that it is not the facility that turns out a good product. It can help, but it is not the main reason for achieving outstanding performances. Improvement comes mainly from the means and methods of training. For example, when I visited the Soviet Union, I was amazed at the deplorable state of most of their training gyms. Weight rooms consisted of antique equipment that you would be hard-pressed to find in any U.S. schools. But yet, the Russians turned out some of the best athletes in the world at that time. Even in the U.S., if you compare many of the old gyms that turned out many great bodybuilders with some of the mirror and chrome gyms of today, you will see that there is little to compare.
Most modern gyms look good and have nice appeal, but the product remains the same or, in many cases, inferior to what was turned out in some of the old “sweaty, crummy” gyms. Until we start looking at how it is best to train an athlete, many people will still be impressed by looks rather than results. But as the saying goes, caveat empor, buyer beware.
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